Data Analytics and Human Centered Data

Using computational methods to transform both structured and unstructured data into actionable knowledge; and to understand and enable humans to explore and gain insight from vast data sets

Researchers Working in this Area

Related Research Projects

Analysis of Academic Activity Patterns in Academic Literature

Time frame
2017-2017
Investigators
Jana Diesner, Vetle Torvik
Total funding to date
$25,000.00
Funding agency
Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information

The project team will work on extracting key concepts from scholarly publications and explore techniques for building a taxonomy of extracted concepts by leveraging open knowledge bases (e.g., Wikipedia). The outcome of this process will be evaluated for various science and technology knowledge platform-based analysis services. The techniques, which reduce semantic ambiguity, will analyze…

BD Hubs: Collaborative Proposal: Midwest: Midwest Big Data Hub: Building Communities to Harness the Data Revolution

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
Catherine Blake
Total funding to date
$2,883,274.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

The Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH) is a network of regional institutions created to facilitate collection, management, and use of complex information, creating active partnerships of experts and resources to address issues relevant to life in the Midwest.

MBDH aims to help member organizations working in Big Data coordinate…

Midwest Big Data Hub

Big Data-Theoretic Approach to Quantify Organizational Failure Mechanisms in Probabilistic Risk Assessment

Time frame
2015-Present
Investigators
Zahra Mohaghegh, Catherine Blake
Total funding to date
$899,663.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Catastrophic events such as Fukushima and Katrina have made it clear that integrating physical and social causes of failure into a cohesive modeling framework is critical in order to prevent complex technological accidents and to maintain public safety and health. In this research, experts in Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), Organizational Behavior and Information Science and Data…

CAREER: III: Modeling the Heterogeneity of Heterogeneity: Algorithms, Theories and Applications

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
Jingrui He
Total funding to date
$415,836.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Nowadays, as an intrinsic property of big data, data heterogeneity can be seen in a variety of real world applications, ranging from security to manufacturing, from healthcare to crowdsourcing. Many high-impact data mining applications exhibit the co-existence of multiple types of heterogeneity, such as different classification tasks, different data sources, and different labeling oracles.…

modeling heterogeneity

Collaborative Research: Changes in Molecular Gas and Galaxy Properties Over Time in the Era of Integral Field Unit Surveys

Time frame
2016-Present
Investigator
Matthew Turk
Total funding to date
$267,664.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Changes of a galaxy's properties over time are driven by the quantity of its cold gas, the raw material from which stars form. Thus, understanding the properties of a galaxy's cold gas component will tell us both how the star formation process changes over time and how this affects galaxies. Using a recently completed survey of carbon monoxide gas in a sample of nearby galaxies, the project…

galaxy

Collaborative Research: Accelerating Synthetic Biology Discovery & Exploration through Knowledge Integration

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$211,699.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

The scientific challenge for this project is to accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. In particular, many parts used in synthetic biology come from or are initially tested in a simple bacteria, E. coli, but many potential applications in energy, agriculture, materials, and health require either different bacteria or higher level organisms (yeast for…

synthetic biology

Collaborative Research: S12-SSI: Inquiry-Focused Volumetric Data Analysis Across Scientific Domains: Sustaining and Expanding the yt Community

Time frame
2017-Present
Investigator
Matthew Turk
Total funding to date
$1,061,721.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Scientific discovery across the physical sciences is increasingly dependent on the analysis of volumetric - or three-dimensional - data, that may come from a supercomputer simulation, direct measurement, or mathematical models. Researchers typically seek to extract meaningful insights from this data by visualizing and analyzing it in various ways. The ways in which scientists process…

yt project

Conservation Legacies: Understanding the Long-term Impacts of Private Foundation Investment in International Biodiversity Conservation

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
Jana Diesner
Total funding to date
$550,000.00
Funding agency
MacArthur Foundation

The overall goal of this project is to advance knowledge of the long-term impacts of international funding for biodiversity conservation from private foundations and the factors associated with sustainable conservation gains over time. The project will analyze funding from private foundations, with a focus on MacArthur Foundation investment in conservation as a case study. Our team will focus…

conservation

Data Storytelling Toolkit for Libraries (DSTL)

Time frame
2022-Present
Investigators
Kate McDowell, Matthew Turk
Total funding to date
$99,330.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

The University of Illinois, in collaboration with multiple community college and public libraries, will develop a data storytelling toolkit for libraries (DSTL) to support meaningful and effective data communication, empowering libraries to utilize the rapidly growing data landscape. DSTL will connect real-world examples of data use with data stories (including narrative strategies and data…

internet tab on bookshelf

III: Small: Predictive Analysis of Diabetes Dedicated Social Networks

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
Jingrui He
Total funding to date
$448,049.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

This project will study diabetes dedicated social networks. It aims to harness diabetes patients' online social behaviors from multiple networks to predict their biomarker measurements such as glycated hemoglobin and fasting blood glucose. This project will provide a paradigm shift from exploration to prediction compared with state-of-the-art research on diabetes dedicated social networks,…

diabetes

Impact of Data Quality and Provenance

Time frame
2014-2017
Investigator
Jana Diesner
Total funding to date
$130,475.00
Funding agency
Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information

How do limitations and intransparencies in data quality and data provenance bias research outcomes, and how can we detect and mitigate these limitations? For example, we have been investigating the impact of entity resolution errors on network analysis results. We found that commonly reported network metrics and derived implications can strongly deviate from the truth—as established based on…

Improving Patient Outcomes by Listening to Their Social Media Communications

Time frame
2017-2019
Investigator
Ian Brooks
Total funding to date
$15,000.00
Funding agency
Homecare Education Advocacy & Resource Team Support

It is difficult to understand the effectiveness of various treatment options when a huge number of external factors such as lifestyle, diet, and environment affect the burden of a disease. A major barrier to understanding is the challenge of scale—sampling enough patients to separate the major, minor, and negligible factors. With access to a database of more than one trillion public social…

social media icons

INDICATOR: An Information System for Monitoring the Health of a Community

Time frame
2007-2011
Investigator
Ian Brooks
Total funding to date
$300,723.00
Funding agency
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carle Foundation

INDICATOR is a novel information system for collecting, integrating, and analyzing data from multiple sources to provide public health decision makers real-time data on the health of their community. Data comes from sources as varied as emergency department visits, school attendance, veterinary clinics, and social media postings and together have been used to change public policy in outbreak…

INDICATOR

Innovation in an Aging Society

Time frame
2013-2020
Investigator
Vetle Torvik
Total funding to date
$569,272.00
Funding agency
National Bureau of Economic Research

The U.S. scientific workforce is aging - the average age of both US academics and medical school faculty increased to the late 40s, from the early 40s in 1970. This aging is troubling because people are seen to make important scientific contributions early in their careers. Moreover, the U.S. is turning to innovation as an economic driver, and the aging of the population will both increase and…

aging society

National Forum Data Mining Research Using In Copyright and Limited Access Text Datasets Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda for Researchers Libraries and Content Providers

Time frame
2017-2019
Investigator
Bertram Ludäscher
Total funding to date
$99,536.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Copyright law and resource licensing complicate the application of text data mining for research. This project convened a National Forum on Text Data Mining with Use-Limited Data in April 2018 that brought together 25 leading stakeholders selected among researchers, librarians, content providers, legal experts, and representatives of scholarly societies to articulate an agenda that provides…

text mining icon

Natural Language Processing for Building and Enhancing Graph Data and Theory

Investigator
Jana Diesner

How can we use user-generated content to construct, infer or refine network data? We have been tackling this problem by leveraging communication content produced and disseminated in social networks to enhance graph data. For example, we have used domain-adjusted sentiment analysis to label graphs with valence values in order to enable triadic balance assessment. The resulting method enables…

NCSA Faculty Fellowship: Predictive Modeling for Impact Assessment

Time frame
2015-2016
Investigator
Jana Diesner
Total funding to date
$24,323.00
Funding agency
National Center for Supercomputing Applications

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner a received an Faculty Fellowship and seed funding for her project, “Predictive Modeling for Impact Assessment,” from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Diesner collaborates closely with NCSA scientists on the project, which builds on her work developing computational solutions…

Pathtracker: A smartphone-based system for mobile infectious disease detection and epidemiology

Time frame
2015-Present
Investigator
Ian Brooks
Total funding to date
$1,005,692.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

This project will develop a mobile sensor technology for performing detection and identification of viral and bacterial pathogens. By means of a smartphone-based detection instrument, the results are shared with a cloud-based data management service that will enable physicians to rapidly visualize the geographical and temporal spread of infectious disease. When deployed by a community of…

RIDIR: Collaborative Research: Developing and Deploying SKOPE - A Resource for Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments

Time frame
2016-Present
Investigator
Bertram Ludäscher
Total funding to date
$884,627.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Recent research has demonstrated that investigations of contemporary societal problems can benefit from the use of long-term environmental data and from comparisons with cases in which the interactions of human societies with their environments is well-documented over centuries. By providing easy access to time- and place-specific long-term environmental data, this project seeks to facilitate…

Pueblo village

Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis

Time frame
2015-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$15,000.00
Funding agency
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Music prints and manuscripts created over the past thousand years sit on the shelves of libraries and museums around the globe. As these organizations digitize their collections, images of these scores are increasingly accessible online. However, the musical content remains difficult to search.

Google Books and HathiTrust have already made it possible to search the content of text…

Smart Water Crowdsensing: Examining How Innovative Data Analytics and Citizen Science Can Ensure Safe Drinking Water in Rural Versus Suburban Communities

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
Dong Wang
Total funding to date
$1,031,655.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Monitoring drinking water contamination is vitally important to inform consumers about water safety, identify source water problems, and facilitate discussion of public health and the environment of our drinking water. The overall goal of this project is to develop a framework for reliable and timely detection of drinking water contamination to build sustainable and connected communities. It…

glass being filled with water

Socio-technical Data Analytics (SODA) Education

Time frame
2012-2016
Investigator
Catherine Blake
Total funding to date
$498,777.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

This project will create both a master’s and doctoral-level specialization in Socio-technical Data Analytics (SODA). Partnerships with local researchers and businesses who already work with large data-sets will enable master's graduates to receive first-hand experience with both the social and technical implications of large digital data collections, and thus be well-prepared for leadership…

TextTransfer: Corpus-Based Detection of Secondary Use of Scientific Publications

Time frame
2017-2019
Investigator
Jana Diesner
Total funding to date
$112,667.00
Funding agency
Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Institute for German Language (IDS) in Germany

In this collaborative project, we are using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to identify secondary practical uses of research findings from final reports of grant funded work. Such reports are often stored in specialized databases, where long-term archiving activities focus on standardization, interoperability, and information indexing and retrieval. However, secondary use of…

close-up view of journal article

The Whole Tale

Time frame
2016-Present
Investigators
Bertram Ludäscher, Matthew Turk
Total funding to date
$4,986,951.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Scholarly publications today are still mostly disconnected from the underlying data and code used to produce the published results and findings, despite an increasing recognition of the need to share all aspects of the research process. As data become more open and transportable, a second layer of research output has emerged, linking research publications to the associated data, possibly along…

Weakly Supervised Graph Neural Networks

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
Jingrui He
Total funding to date
$149,921.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Graph Neural Networks have proven to be a powerful tool for harnessing graph data, which is widely used for representing rich relational information in multiple areas. However, the performance of graph neural networks largely depends on the amount of labeled data, which is subject to an expensive and time-consuming annotation process. This creates data without labels, or a label scarcity.…

graph on a computer screen

yt

Time frame
2012-2017
Investigator
Matthew Turk
Total funding to date
$2,000,000.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

The yt project aims to produce an integrated science environment for collaboratively asking and answering astrophysical questions. To do so, it will encompass the creation of initial conditions, the execution of simulations, and the detailed exploration and visualization of the resultant data. It will also provide a standard framework based on physical quantities interoperability between codes…

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